Racial and Moral Coding in Fantasy Literature and Cinema AI-pedia

Racial and moral coding in fantasy refers to the ways fantasy literature, film, television and games use physical appearance, colour, costume, accent and the design of invented peoples to tell the audience who is good and who is evil. In criticism, "coding" means signalling a trait through indirect cues, such as skin tone, facial features or clothing, rather than stating it directly. "Moral coding" is the use of such cues to mark goodness or wickedness. "Racial coding" is the use of cues that link fictional groups to real-world ethnic or racial groups, whether or not the creator intended it.

Fantasy has long relied on a visual and symbolic contrast between light and darkness. In many traditions light stands for life, knowledge and divine favour, and darkness stands for death, ignorance and corruption. Critics argue that in modern fantasy, much of which was written by white European and American authors in the late 19th and 20th centuries, this ancient symbolism became entangled with the racial hierarchies of that period. Heroic peoples were often described as fair-skinned and radiant. Enemy peoples were often dark-skinned, described with features resembling racist caricatures, or dressed in costumes drawn from non-European cultures.

The subject is debated rather than settled. Scholars, writers, fans and creators disagree about how far particular works are racially coded, whether authors intended such meanings, how much historical context excuses older works, and how adaptations and new works should handle these conventions. The debate has influenced casting decisions, game design, publishing and literary awards, and it has encouraged a large body of fantasy written by authors from groups that were often cast as villains in older works.

Terminology

Coding

In literary and film studies, a character or group is said to be "coded" as something when the work associates them with it through hints, conventions or stereotypes rather than explicit statement. For example, a fictional people might never be called Arab or African, but their costume, architecture, weapons and described skin colour may lead readers and viewers to connect them with real Arab or African cultures. Coding can be deliberate or unintentional. Critics generally treat the effect on the audience as important regardless of intention.

Moral coding and physiognomic shorthand

Moral coding uses appearance as shorthand for character. Common examples include beauty signalling virtue, ugliness or deformity signalling vice, pale or golden colouring for heroes, and dark colouring, shadow or black clothing for villains. This shorthand is related to the older idea of physiognomy, the belief that a person's inner character can be read from their face and body. Physiognomy is now regarded as a pseudoscience (a set of claims presented as scientific without valid evidence).

"Race" in fantasy

Fantasy fiction and role-playing games have traditionally used the word "race" for different kinds of intelligent beings, such as elves, dwarves, orcs and halflings. These are closer to separate species than to human ethnic groups. Critics argue that using the word "race" for groups whose abilities, temperament and morality are fixed at birth reproduces the logic of biological determinism: the discredited idea that real human races have inborn moral and intellectual differences. Defenders reply that fantasy races are not human and that the word simply follows older usage. Some publishers have since moved away from the term (see the section on games below).

Historical background

Light and darkness in religion and myth

The association of light with goodness and darkness with evil is very old and appears in many cultures. Zoroastrianism, an ancient Iranian religion, frames the cosmos as a struggle between a good principle associated with light and truth and a destructive principle associated with darkness and the lie. The Hebrew Bible opens with God creating light and separating it from darkness. The New Testament, especially the Gospel of John, repeatedly uses light as a symbol for God and truth. Germanic and Norse mythology, which strongly influenced modern fantasy, includes light elves and dark elves.

In these sources, light and darkness usually refer to daylight, fire, sight and blindness, or spiritual states. They were not originally about skin colour. Many scholars argue, however, that in later European culture these symbols came to be applied to human bodies, so that "fair" could mean both beautiful and light-skinned, and "dark" could mean both wicked and dark-skinned.

Medieval romance and the enemy outsider

Medieval European epic and romance, which later fantasy writers studied closely, often depicted Muslim "Saracens" and other outsiders as enemies of Christian heroes. Works such as the Old French Song of Roland describe enemy armies in ways that mix religious, geographic and physical difference. Medievalists note that medieval ideas of difference were not identical to modern race, but these texts helped establish the pattern of a righteous Western host facing a vast, exotic army from the East or South.

Physiognomy and racial science

In the late 18th century the Swiss writer Johann Kaspar Lavater popularised physiognomy across Europe. In the 19th century, pseudoscientific racial theories ranked human groups in hierarchies, typically placing white Europeans at the top. The Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso claimed that criminals could be identified by physical "atavistic" features, meaning supposed throwbacks to more primitive forms. These ideas shaped popular assumptions that moral worth could be seen in the body. They were widespread when the foundations of modern fantasy were being laid.

Colonial adventure fiction

Late Victorian and Edwardian adventure fiction, such as H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines (1885) and She (1887), took British heroes into imagined African "lost worlds." These books combined the exotic setting, the hidden civilisation and the heroic expedition with the assumptions of the British Empire. They influenced later "sword and sorcery" and "lost race" fiction, and through these, much of 20th-century fantasy.

Tolkien and Middle-earth

J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit (1937), The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955) and the posthumously published Silmarillion (1977) are the most widely discussed case. Tolkien's influence on later fantasy is so large that his conventions became, for many readers, the default shape of the genre.

Mythic light and darkness

Much of Tolkien's imagery draws on light symbolism from religion and myth. The Elves revere starlight and the light of the lost Two Trees. Galadriel gives Frodo a phial containing the light of a star. The realm of Sauron, Mordor, is a place of smoke, shadow and barrenness. On this level, light and darkness describe holiness, hope and creation against corruption, despair and destruction. Tolkien was a devout Roman Catholic, and many critics read this imagery primarily in religious terms.

Description of peoples

Critics have pointed to a second level, in which the light and dark imagery appears to map onto bodies and geography. The heroic peoples of the West, such as the Elves, the Númenóreans and their descendants, and the Rohirrim, are frequently described as fair, tall and bright-eyed. Several of Sauron's human allies come from the East and South. The Easterlings and the "Swarthy Men" of The Silmarillion are described as swarthy. The Haradrim of the South include, in the account of the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, men from Far Harad described as black and compared with trolls. The forces of evil are thus partly drawn from regions that, on a map oriented like Europe's, correspond to Asia and Africa.

The Orcs, Sauron's soldiers, are the most debated. In a 1958 letter commenting on a proposed film treatment (published in The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien), Tolkien described Orcs as squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and "slant eyes", calling them "degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types." Critics frequently cite this passage as evidence that the Orcs' appearance drew on European stereotypes of East Asian and Central Asian peoples.

Complicating evidence

Other features of Tolkien's work complicate a simple reading:

• Several major villains and morally failed characters are from the "fair" peoples, including the wizard Saruman, the steward Denethor, the Black Númenóreans, and, in The Silmarillion, many Elves and Men of the West who commit terrible acts.
• In The Two Towers, Sam Gamgee sees a dead Southron soldier and wonders what his name was, where he came from, and whether he was truly evil at heart or had been led into war by lies and threats. Many readers treat this passage as Tolkien deliberately humanising the enemy.
• The Prologue to The Lord of the Rings states that the Harfoots, the most numerous kind of Hobbit, were browner of skin than the other kinds.
• The Drúedain, or Woses, a forest people described as physically unlike the fair peoples, are presented sympathetically and help the Rohirrim.

Tolkien's views on race and on evil

Tolkien publicly rejected Nazi racial theory. In 1938, when a German publisher asked whether he was of "Aryan" descent, he wrote a sharp reply rejecting the question, and his private letters from the Second World War express contempt for the Nazi misuse of Germanic and "Nordic" tradition. Defenders of Tolkien often cite these letters.

Tolkien also struggled with a theological problem the Orcs raised. If Orcs are a people capable of speech, thought and choice, it is hard to reconcile their apparent creation as wholly evil with his Christian belief that nothing is evil in its origin and that rational beings have free will. He returned to the question of the Orcs' origin and nature repeatedly in late essays, published after his death in Morgoth's Ring (1993), part of The History of Middle-earth. He did not reach a final answer. Critics often describe this as an unresolved tension between his theology and the idea of an entire people born evil.

Scholarly assessments

Scholars disagree about how to weigh this evidence. Dimitra Fimi's Tolkien, Race and Cultural History (2009) places Tolkien's peoples in the context of Victorian and early 20th-century ideas about race, heredity and folklore, and argues that these ideas left marks on his invented world even though he opposed racism as a political doctrine. Other scholars, such as Tom Shippey, emphasise Tolkien's philological and mythological sources and his moral complexity. Many critics take a middle position. They argue that Tolkien was not a racist ideologue but that his work reproduces some of the racial assumptions of his time and place, especially in the geography of good and evil and in the physical description of enemies.

Other literary examples

Robert E. Howard and sword and sorcery

Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian in the 1930s, set his stories in an invented prehistoric "Hyborian Age." His essay describing this world's history presents peoples rising and falling through racial vigour and degeneration, ideas common in the racial theorising of his day. His stories frequently use racist depictions of Black characters. Howard's work is widely cited as an example of explicit, rather than merely implicit, racial hierarchy in early fantasy.

H. P. Lovecraft

H. P. Lovecraft's weird fiction is closer to horror than to high fantasy but strongly shaped the genre. Lovecraft held openly racist views, and critics argue that his fear of mixing, degeneration and "alien" bloodlines runs through stories such as "The Horror at Red Hook" and "The Shadow over Innsmouth." In 2015, following a campaign that included the writer Daniel José Older and drew attention to Lovecraft's racism, the World Fantasy Awards announced they would stop using a bust of Lovecraft as their trophy. The writer Nnedi Okorafor, a past winner, had earlier written publicly about receiving a statue of a man who held such views about people like her.

C. S. Lewis and the Calormenes

In C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, the Calormenes are a dark-skinned people from the south who wear turbans, live in a despotic empire, and worship a cruel god called Tash. They feature prominently in The Horse and His Boy (1954) and The Last Battle (1956). Critics, including the novelist Philip Pullman, have described this portrayal as racist and as drawing on European stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims. Defenders note that The Horse and His Boy has a sympathetic Calormene heroine, Aravis, and that in The Last Battle a virtuous Calormene, Emeth, is accepted into Aslan's country.

Harry Potter

J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series (1997–2007) has drawn criticism for its goblins, who run the wizarding bank Gringotts and are shown as greedy and clannish. Some critics argue that this combination resembles long-standing antisemitic stereotypes, and that the film designs, with prominent noses, strengthen the resemblance. Rowling has rejected this reading. The series has also been discussed for its house-elves, who are enslaved and are mostly shown as content with their condition, and for its treatment of characters of colour, who are mostly minor.

A Song of Ice and Fire

George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire (from 1996), adapted for television as Game of Thrones, was praised for moral complexity among its mostly white Westerosi characters. Critics argued that the peoples of the eastern continent of Essos, such as the horse-riding Dothraki, were drawn from stereotypes of "barbaric" Asian and Middle Eastern nomads. The television episode "Mhysa" (2013) ends with freed slaves lifting the white Daenerys Targaryen above a crowd of mostly brown-skinned people. It was widely criticised as an image of a "white saviour," a narrative in which a white character rescues people of colour, who serve mainly as background to the white character's story.

Cinema and television

Film and television make coding more visible because casting, make-up, costume and sound design must give definite form to what a text might leave vague.

Peter Jackson's Middle-earth films

Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001–2003) and Hobbit trilogy (2012–2014) were praised for their visual achievement. They also drew criticism for how they rendered Tolkien's peoples. The heroic peoples were played almost entirely by white actors. The Haradrim were shown with costumes, face coverings and war elephants that critics associated with African and Middle Eastern cultures. The Easterlings wore armour that critics associated with East Asian designs. The Orcs, created with prosthetics and later computer-generated imagery, had dark, broken and mottled skin. Commentators disagree about whether these choices amplified racial coding in the books or simply put into images what the text already described.

In 2010, news reports from New Zealand stated that a casting agent recruiting extras for The Hobbit had turned away a woman of colour and said that Hobbits should be light-skinned. The production said this was the agent's error and not its policy.

The Rings of Power

Amazon's series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (from 2022) cast actors of colour as Elves, Dwarves and Harfoots, including Ismael Cruz Córdova as the Elf Arondir and Sophia Nomvete as the Dwarf princess Disa. The casting attracted organised racist abuse online, as well as arguments that it departed from Tolkien. Supporters pointed to the Prologue's description of browner-skinned Harfoots and argued that nothing in Tolkien rules out such casting. Cast members from Amazon's series and from Jackson's films publicly supported the actors, and Amazon condemned the harassment.

Disney animation

Disney's animated films have often been examined for coding:

• Aladdin (1992) was criticised by Arab-American groups for its opening song, which described the setting as a place where they cut off your ear if they don't like your face. The line was changed for the home video release. Critics also noted that the hero and heroine were drawn with lighter skin and more Anglo features than several villains and guards.
• The Lion King (1994) has been read by some critics as coding its hyenas, who live in a barren wasteland and speak with voices and slang associated with Black and Latino Americans, as stereotypes of poor urban minorities. The villain Scar has a darker coat and black mane than the heroic lions.

Star Wars

Though more often classed as science fantasy, Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1999) was criticised for alien characters that some reviewers said echoed racial stereotypes. These included Jar Jar Binks's speech patterns, the accented villains of the Trade Federation, and the junk dealer Watto. George Lucas denied that any such meaning was intended.

Whitewashing in adaptations

"Whitewashing" means casting white actors as characters written as people of colour, or making such characters appear lighter or more European. Notable fantasy examples include:

• Earthsea. Ursula K. Le Guin wrote her Earthsea books (from 1968) with a mostly brown- and dark-skinned population and pale-skinned villains, the Kargs, partly to reverse the usual convention. For years cover artists showed her protagonist Ged as white. In a 2004 essay in Slate, Le Guin criticised the television miniseries Legend of Earthsea for casting Ged and most of the heroic characters with white actors.
• The Last Airbender. The 2010 film adaptation of the animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender, whose world is based on Asian and Indigenous cultures, cast white actors in the main heroic roles. This led to a sustained protest campaign by fans.
• The Hunger Games. When the 2012 film cast the Black actor Amandla Stenberg as Rue, a character described in the novel with dark brown skin, some viewers posted racist complaints. Ebony Elizabeth Thomas and others have discussed this as an example of audiences assuming that innocent, sympathetic characters must be white.

Bright

The Netflix film Bright (2017) set humans, elves and orcs in modern Los Angeles, with orcs as a despised underclass. The film presented this deliberately as an allegory of racism, but many critics argued that it reinforced the problem by linking a monstrous fantasy race with real Black and Latino communities.

Games

Dungeons & Dragons

The tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, first published in 1974, spread the Tolkien-derived model of fantasy races through gaming and video games. Earlier editions assigned whole species a fixed moral "alignment," such as "always chaotic evil," and gave races fixed bonuses and penalties to intelligence and other abilities. Two groups drew particular criticism:

• Orcs, described as brutal, tribal and less intelligent than humans.
• Drow, dark elves with black or very dark skin who live underground in a cruel society. The popular drow hero Drizzt Do'Urden, created by R. A. Salvatore, was framed as a rare exception who rejects his people's evil.

In 2020, the publisher Wizards of the Coast issued a statement acknowledging that some peoples in the game, with orcs and drow as prime examples, had been portrayed as monstrous and evil in ways that echoed how real-world ethnic groups have been demeaned. It announced changes so that these peoples would be presented as morally and culturally varied. In 2022 it also revised a supplement after criticism of an ape-like species written as former slaves. The 2024 edition of the Player's Handbook replaced the term "race" with "species." These changes were welcomed by many players and criticised by others as unnecessary or as removing traditional elements.

Video games

Video game fantasy has inherited many of the same conventions. The Warcraft series, for example, has portrayed orcs as a tribal warrior culture with honour and a tragic history. This has been praised as more humane than the purely monstrous orc and criticised as a different kind of stereotype, the "noble savage," that borrows from real Indigenous and African cultures.

Other forms of moral coding

Racial coding is one part of a wider practice of using appearance and identity to signal moral status. Critics frequently discuss several related patterns.

Disfigurement and disability

Fantasy villains are often marked by scars, missing limbs, deformities or illness. Examples include Lord Voldemort's snake-like face in Harry Potter and Scar in The Lion King. Disability scholars argue that this links disfigurement and disability with evil and harms people who live with visible differences. In 2018 the British Film Institute said it would stop funding films that used scars or facial differences to mark villains, in support of the "I Am Not Your Villain" campaign by the charity Changing Faces.

Queer coding

"Queer coding" refers to giving characters mannerisms, styles or traits associated with gay, lesbian or gender-nonconforming people without saying so. Disney villains such as Ursula in The Little Mermaid (1989), whose design was inspired by the drag performer Divine, are frequently cited. Critics argue that such coding, combined with the villainy of the characters, links queerness with evil.

Gender and age

The figure of the wicked witch, the evil stepmother and the scheming older woman who envies a young heroine's beauty are long-standing fairy-tale patterns. Feminist critics have discussed how these patterns tie female power, ageing and loss of beauty to villainy.

Beauty as virtue

All of these patterns rest on the general assumption that outward beauty reflects inner goodness. Psychologists have studied a related bias, sometimes called the "beauty is good" stereotype, in which people tend to attribute positive traits to physically attractive people. Some scholars argue that fantasy both draws on and reinforces this bias.

Criticism, responses and counter-traditions

Scholarship

Several academic works have shaped the discussion:

• Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), though about American literature generally, influenced the study of how darkness and Blackness are used symbolically in fiction written mainly by white authors.
• Dimitra Fimi's Tolkien, Race and Cultural History (2009) examined Tolkien's peoples in historical context.
• Helen Young's Race and Popular Fantasy Literature: Habits of Whiteness (2016) argued that the genre developed "habits" that treat whiteness as normal and European-style medieval settings as the default.
• Ebony Elizabeth Thomas's The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games (2019) examined how Black characters in popular youth fantasy are often marginalised, sacrificed or treated as threats.

Fan debate

In 2009, a long series of online discussions known as "RaceFail '09" took place across blogs in science fiction and fantasy fandom. It began with arguments about how white writers should depict characters from other cultures and widened into a broad debate about racism in the genre and its communities. It is often cited as a turning point that made questions of representation more prominent in fantasy publishing.

Counter-traditions in literature

Many writers have responded by building fantasy worlds that reverse, question or abandon the older conventions:

• Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea series made its heroes brown- and dark-skinned and its antagonists pale.
• Charles R. Saunders, a Black American writer, created the African-inspired sword and sorcery hero Imaro (from 1981) partly in response to the racism he found in Howard's fiction. He also wrote critical essays on racism in fantasy.
• N. K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy (2015–2017) explores oppression and the treatment of a feared group as less than human. Each novel won the Hugo Award for Best Novel, making Jemisin the first author to win that award in three consecutive years.
• Nnedi Okorafor, Marlon James (Black Leopard, Red Wolf, 2019) and Tomi Adeyemi (Children of Blood and Bone, 2018) have written fantasy rooted in African mythology and settings.
• Many other writers have created fantasy drawing on East Asian, South Asian, Middle Eastern, Indigenous American and Pacific traditions. Some describe this as moving the genre away from a single European medieval template.

Changes in adaptation and design

Film and television producers have increasingly used colour-conscious or "colour-blind" casting in fantasy. Colour-blind casting means choosing actors without regard to ethnicity. Colour-conscious casting means choosing actors with deliberate attention to ethnicity. Examples include The Rings of Power and the television series The Wheel of Time (from 2021). Game publishers have revised the language of racial difference. These changes have been both praised as inclusive and attacked by some audiences, which has made fantasy casting a recurring subject of public controversy.

Debates and open questions

Intention and effect

One central disagreement is whether a work should be judged by its author's intentions or by its effects on readers. Defenders of older authors often stress intention and biography, such as Tolkien's rejection of Nazism. Critics often argue that a work can carry racist assumptions regardless of its author's conscious beliefs, because those assumptions were part of the culture the author absorbed.

Historical context

A second question is how far historical context should affect judgement. Some argue that it is anachronistic (applying standards from a later time) to criticise early 20th-century writers by present-day standards. Others reply that understanding a work in its context includes recognising the racial thinking of that context, and that many contemporaries of these writers already opposed such thinking.

Symbolism versus bodies

A third question is whether light and dark symbolism is inherently racial. Some argue that the imagery of light and darkness is ancient, nearly universal, and about spiritual states rather than skin. Others argue that once heroes are consistently pale and enemies consistently dark, the symbolism and the racial meaning cannot be cleanly separated, whatever its origins.

The "evil race" problem

A fourth question is whether fantasy can include peoples who are evil by nature without echoing real-world racism. Some writers and game designers argue that inherently evil monsters are a useful storytelling tool, letting heroes fight without moral complication. Others argue that once a group can speak, form societies and make choices, portraying all its members as born evil mirrors the logic used to dehumanise real people. Tolkien's own unresolved writing about the Orcs is often cited in this debate.

Representation and reversal

A fifth question concerns responses. Some critics question whether simply reversing colour schemes, as in Earthsea, or diversifying casts solves the underlying problem, or whether it leaves the assumption that appearance signals morality untouched. Others argue that representation itself matters, because it changes which kinds of people audiences picture as heroes.

Audience reactions to casting

Finally, the strong and sometimes abusive reactions to actors of colour in fantasy roles have themselves become a subject of study. Some commentators read them as evidence of how deeply the convention of a white default has shaped audience expectations of the genre.

See also

• Light and darkness in religion and mythology
• Physiognomy
• Scientific racism
• Orientalism
• Whitewashing in film
• White saviour narrative
• Queer coding
• Disability in fiction
• Race in fantasy role-playing games
• Orcs in fiction
• J. R. R. Tolkien's views on race
• Afrofuturism
• Sword and sorcery
• RaceFail '09
• Representation in media